Toluu

Google Blogoscoped

Google, the World, and the World Wide Web, Weblogged

What Happened In My Birth YearYesterday

What Happened In My Birth Year is a new site I’ve been working on. Feedback to this project very welcome, bug reports too!

[Thanks Tony, Niniane and Aaron for early testing!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: What Happened In My Birth Year | Comments]

[Advertisement] Directory Journal: Search Engine Friendly Directory

Google to Air Super Bowl Ad?February 7

On their way to become a more normal company, Google went from No Ads to Mostly Good Ads. Two examples are the “story” videos for for Google search and one for the Nexus One phone. Some speculations are that Google will now air an ad in the Super Bowl due in some hours. Wikipedia explains:

The Super Bowl has been the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the premier association of professional American football, since 1967. In most years, the Super Bowl is the most-watched American television broadcast. Many popular singers and musicians have performed during the event’s pre-game and halftime ceremonies. The day on which the Super Bowl is played is now considered a de facto American national holiday, called Super Bowl Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest day for U.S. food consumption, after Thanksgiving Day. (...)

Because of its high viewership, commercial airtime for the Super Bowl broadcast is the most expensive of the year. Due to the high cost of investing in advertising on the Super Bowl, companies regularly develop their most expensive advertisements for this broadcast. As a result, watching and discussing th

Frequency of Strip Versions of Various Games (xkcd)February 6

[Cartoon from Xkcd by Randall Munroe, (cc) free to share but not to sell]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Frequency of Strip Versions of Various Games ... | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay

Google Chrome PageRank CheckerFebruary 6

I was just trying to find out the PageRank of a couple of sites using Internet Explorer’s Google Toolbar, but something was broken. Google Chrome has a nice PageRank extension, though. As you can see in the screenshot, it’s helpful by immediately showing the actual value instead of just a green bar. A couple of times it reverted to zero after loading, but otherwise the values it was showing looked like they were the correct ones. (Considering it doesn’t look like it’s an offical extension, I’m not sure though how accurate the values are now, or will be in the future.)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Chrome PageRank Checker | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay

Google People HopperFebruary 5

Google’s social network site Orkut has a new application that lets you morph one face into another. Called People Hopper, it was broken yesterday but is working now. I’ve created a profile for this purpose (I deleted my real one a while ago) and morphed the first picture, Mr. John Cleese, into Tony Ruscoe below:

The interesting part here is that the intermediate steps themselves are other people from Orkut. Clicking on any face will take you to their profile. Nice here is that Google does some face detection, so you don’t need to work with perfectly cropped portraits. Beyond this, the general area of face search/ portrait comparison/ finding likely-looking faces might have some privacy implications in the future. Will Google Images be able to find your appearance twin in a couple of years – and would we want to be found?

[Thanks WebSonic.nl and Tony!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google People Hopper | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay